


Good Morning, Soldier (Dobroe Utro, Soldat)

by beforethedawn, ConstructFairytales, Destinyawakened



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anxiety, Canon Compliant, Capture, Daybreak, First Avenger through Civil War, Gen, Guns, Homecoming, Longing, Memories, Nine - Freeform, Non-Consensual Electroconvulsive Therapy, PTSD, Seventeen - Freeform, Torture, Trains, Water Torture, beatings, benign, freight car, furnace - Freeform, held captive, memory wiping, one - Freeform, rusted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6814639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beforethedawn/pseuds/beforethedawn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstructFairytales/pseuds/ConstructFairytales, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destinyawakened/pseuds/Destinyawakened
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every word has a very distinct meaning when they are calling them out, sending The Soldier into a slew of memories he'll never remember completely, making him utterly compliant.<br/>Or<br/>A collection of memories set to Winter Soldier's command words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Preface

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Not Beta'd, but my lovely co-author did do a wonder edit job, but if you see anything out of place, let us know!  
> 2) We don't claim to be history buffs or completely versed in all things Cap and Bucky, but we do try and this our take on some things.  
> 3) please kudo and comment if you enjoy! Feedback is <3

It’s the same every time, and though he doesn’t always remember the last time the list of words are uttered, there’s a familiarity about it, something buried in his memory matrix, the primal way his body responds, that  _ it _ knows what’s coming next, even if The Soldier’s mind does not. 

Freezing does not hurt. Thawing hurts. It burns, like body parts plunged into boiling water. 

  
He’s pulled from the cryo chamber by two men, his limbs frozen solid, but his heart beat crawls back to normal, climbing out of hibernation squeeze by sluggish squeeze.

His body warms by the second, painfully, but he just can’t seem to get a hold of himself just yet. Everything is … fragmented and confusing, tenses switching. Was and is are the same thing, and he’s not sure, he was not sure he ever had a past. He is only chaotic present, out of focus, all a blur.

He’s pretty sure the people around him have done this before, as he’s carried, all heavy limbs, across the metal grated floor, like they’ve done this a thousand times, and he’s the only one to whom this is new. He doesn’t know who these people are who heft him into the center of the room, he barely even knows his own name.

Soldier--  _ Soldat _ .

He’s strapped into a chair, metal headgear pressed in tight over his head and face, in various spots, points that matter, that shock and stimulate, make him docile and compliant while they do what they always do: read off the words that bring something savage from the depths within him, and make him  _ theirs _ all over again.

Not that he’s been anyone else’s.

  
He realizes that the screaming he hears is his own.

His screaming dies down as the first word is read to him, his breath slows, his mind starts to turn into a muddled mess. The word is meant to bring compliance, as they all are, one at a time, filing away what is left of his personal self to reveal the monster underneath, though there isn’t much left to file away at this point. It makes him cling harder to what he has left. It makes him want to scream louder.


	2. Longing

In the first few months in HYDRA’s control, Bucky tried to escape, on more than one occasion. Finally, when his handlers had enough and would not longer tolerate it, Bucky was strapped down to a table, and asked a very serious, very sympathetic question, a lure to get the truth from him. Though, The Soldier didn’t realize it at the time.

“Why do you keep trying to escape?” One man asked, in a very thick Russian accent.

“I want to go  _ home _ ,” Bucky had said, honest and simple, eyes adverted from the man, who looked so keenly empathetic at him just moments before. The look in the man’s eyes changed dramatically as he looked over the soldier’s frame to the another man in a lab coat nearby.

“You are  _ longing  _ for America then? Ah, yes, we can cure this _ longing _ .” The man spoke in Russian to the other behind Bucky, and then looked down at The Soldier again. “No rest. No food. One week, then we see how much you long, hm?”

Wide blue eyes went frantic, the soldier struggling in his restraints, to no avail. He was pushed into a separate room, away from everything else, isolated. For one week, Bucky was shown nothing but clips of New York, of Brooklyn, and never once allowed to doze off, allowed to eat, tempted with all of them when they checked in. When he started to fall asleep, he was doused in water, or hooked to a machine, and shocked until sleep was taken from him all over again.

In one week, the soldier learned to stop longing.


	3. Rusted

Gunfire. Boots clanking on metal grates. A voice muffled overhead, but all Bucky could make out was the rattling of the train tracks below, clattering with each pass it made over the metal rails, and creaky wooden ties.    
  
The car was so damn full of rust that it was a miracle it didn’t just shake apart right there.   
  
Almost painful ringing in Bucky’s ears started the second he opened fire. He and Steve were separated by a door, large and heavy, which didn’t budge. No time to worry about Steve, now; he opened fire and ducked behind stacked freight. Only a handful of noisy seconds passed, and Bucky was out of ammo, all he could hear was the pounding of his heart, frantic and  _ scared _ , clattering away like the old train on uneven track.

He’d never been terrified before, not like  _ this _ , not since after Zola almost  _ dissected _ him alive. Too afraid to be taken back, sure that he’d never be found a second time, Bucky almost didn’t see Steve open the door into the car he was in. He signaled Bucky, tossed his pistol, and Bucky caught it. Steve rushed, newly huge, and pushed more freight into a man, who ducked, but Bucky popped up and shot the man as he stood again.

The rest was done in seconds, but fear the remained as Steve looked at him. There was some worry there, a flash of concern in Steve’s clear eyes that seemed alien. Steve never had to worry about Bucky before, the thought was ridiculous. There was no reason to start now … even if the tables really had turned … even if Steve had been built up, and Bucky had been scraped hollow on the inside. Maybe it was imaginary. Maybe Steve didn’t look at him any differently now, even if Bucky could have sworn he had, for just a sickening second there.

Nothing was stable now, not after Zola.

“I had ‘em on the ropes,” Bucky said, loud enough to be heard.

“I know you did,” was all Steve replied with, they had too much mission to finish to get emotional now, or to check on each other.

_ After. _

Suddenly, Steve pushed him back down. The shield was up, and blocking the huge, robotic soldier from getting to him -- to Bucky. The blast reflected and blew a hole in the side of the freight car, Steve toppled, and the shield landed nearest Bucky, who picked it up, ready to defend his best friend one more time, maybe the last, maybe not. Bucky shot two off, and the third never went, another big blast pushing him right out the hole, the shield long forgotten as Bucky tried desperately to hold on.

The handle of the car door was old, bolts threatening to break loose, rusted and worn out. Steve was hanging half out of the car with his hand out to Bucky, trying to get to him, like it was possible, but Bucky knew better. His fingers slipped, cold and frozen, and the handle broke away, flakes of rust behind it, red and orange like dry fall leaves in central park, the sort that fell just before the city’s first real plunge into winter.

All Bucky could do was scream on his way down, bones splintering when he hit jagged rocks and cliffs. Pain that Bucky didn’t have  _ words _ for swelled in his left arm just before blackness swallowed him up, and his body hit the bottom of a ravine.

Almost a full minute later, large, flame-colored flakes of rust landed on Bucky’s mangled body, lying themselves over his face and dark hair like flower petals on the glossy lid of a coffin.


	4. Seventeen

Beaten, bloody, and bruised, Bucky stayed on his knees, defiant, over and over again. He was being berated in Russian, a language he was slowly coming to know over the course of the last few months, but still refused to speak, or answer to. 

The task was simple, as it had been the last fifteen times: kill the unarmed man who was bound in front of him, pleading to be let go. A single bullet in the head at close range. No difficulty, no challenge. Easy.

For Bucky, it wasn’t so easy. There were things that were already starting to slip, things about himself he could only remember like a movie he’d seen once, about someone else.  It was a nice movie, at least, but every day, every training exercise made it feel more and more distant.  
He knew, though, he _knew_ that he was _not_ going to shoot the bound man. He would not do that. The guy in the movie would not do that. Ever.   
  
If he killed this poor, tied up bastard, if he shot him in the head like he’d been punished for refusing to do _fifteen_ times already … who would he be? Not the guy in the movie. Would the movie even play anymore? To give them what they wanted would be to lose himself entirely, and he’d already lost enough, and there was no saying what they would take from him next.

Home? Steve? Becks?

He just wanted to sleep. He needed to sleep. His eyes burned with every blink, and his vision kept blurring. No sleep until he killed the man. No food until he killed the man. Blaring Russian music in his ears until he killed the man. It’d been … a long time. Even without windows Bucky was pretty sure he’d been awake for more than four days straight. He wasn’t sure he was real, anymore. He wasn’t sure the gun was real, or the man he had to shoot.  Three days later, they dragged him into the training room again, and forced the gun in his hand, just as they had done the last sixteen times now. One bullet was loaded.  All he had to do was kill the unarmed man in front of him, grovelling to be let go, and it would stop. It would  _ stop _ . It would stop for both of them. Hell, killing this man might be a mercy compared to what HYDRA would do to the bound prisoner if he kept saying no.

“Soldier, kill him,” the man said over the speaker in the thick Russian he’d now grown accustomed to understanding. The voice was somehow even louder than the blaring music.

The soldier stood there, finger on the trigger in his right hand, shaking as he stared down at the man who had fat tears running down his ruddy face. He closed his eyes for a second, stilling himself, and when the soldier opened them again, Bucky was watching from above. Bucky watched the soldier in his body hold the gun, and raise it. He couldn’t feel anything, he wasn’t a part of it, he couldn’t stop it. He was just /watching/.

  
Humanity exhausted, The Soldier shot the man in the head. Blood splattered up the wall behind the dead man, and across his boots before he fell like a sack of flour.

The sound rang out against the metal walls, and finally, the blaring music /stopped/.

The gun slipped through The Soldier’s gloved fingers, and Bucky watched it in what seemed like slow-motion, until it landed on the ground in the puddle of blood stretching across the floor under his feet.

He felt … nothing. 

“Wonderful,” came the accented voice again, and the sound of clapping from a distance as the Soldier was urged down with guards on his back, pressing him to his knees to cuff him, make him less dangerous.  The Soldier, the  _ body _ did not resist as Bucky watched from somewhere near the ceiling.

“Only took  _ Seventeen _ goes.”


	5. Daybreak

When he came to, the the sun was just breaking across the ravine in hues of orange and red, the snow had stopped pelting down for now, leaving him half covered in a thick blanket of it, a good thing too, as his arm throbbed, aching and numb all at once. The bleeding was minimal at the moment, the icy cold up against the severed part of his arm doing a well enough job to keep him alive, for now. For how long? Bucky couldn’t say, as he was in too much shock and pain to move, to crawl or force himself to his feet was unbearable, and all he could do was hope, and pray, someone found him, someone  _ not _ part of HYDRA.

Bucky watched the skies go from blue to black, falling and in out of shock, sleep never taking for long. When the  _ daybreak _ came again, a blizzard was starting in and someone had a hold of him, dragging his limp form across the snowy ground.

“ _ Steve _ ?” he asked, hoarsely, and tried to move to see who it was, but most of his bones were too shattered to manage.

  
Whoever it was didn’t answer. Steve would have answered.

“Where are you taking me?” he murmured, not sure his voice could be heard over the blowing snow and ice whipping around his wind chapped face.

The answer came in another language, but the man made no attempt to stop, he simply kept dragging Bucky, until finally, he passed out again, with no hope in sight, there was little left he could do, but hope to  _ die _ of frostbite.


	6. Furnace

“Please, where am I? What’s … what’s that smell? Is something … burning?” Bucky slurred in English, not even sure if anyone could hear him, or where he was as he woke up.   
  
He was finally out of the cold of the ravine, warmer, and yet colder in a lot of ways that had nothing to do with ice and sleet, but everything to do with the people standing over him and the bright light overhead. Bucky tried to get a good look at them, blurry through tired eyes, and whatever was running in his blood to make some of the pain go away.   
  
They wore masks. Medical masks.

Someone hushed him, patting his right shoulder. The sound of buzzing near him, pressure-- not exactly pain-- pressed into skin of his left shoulder, the sound and smell of bone being sawed through was enough to make him close his eyes again. 

More pressure, and the saw started to struggle. One of the doctors held Bucky’s body still to keep it from rolling toward the saw.   
  
“What are you- what are you doing? What’s going on?” Bucky slurred again, but wasn’t sure he wanted an answer, even if they’d give him one.   
  
His left side felt strangely … lighter all of a sudden, and he passed out.

In and out again, he was only aware of the heat because the smell was something else. It woke him out of nowhere, bolting upright he was held down again, by four doctors this time.

He could smell burning flesh, like a barbeque, and heat like a furnace was making him  _ sweat _ on the table.    
“No, no … no … “   
He managed to turn his head in time to see that his arm was gone, and a metal hub was being fitted to the bare socket where it had been at his shoulder. They were burning the bleeding flesh to the metal, cauterizing it as the skin bubbled and smoked.   
  
Bucky thrashed, and managed to scream through the sedation, his voice breaking and bubbling with horror like flesh burning in a _ furnace _ . 


	7. Nine

_ Nine. Nine is the number of men on the field in baseball… Baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers... _

Two guards were no longer enough, not once the soldier really settled in. Training had begun, the arm was perfectly in use now, and he was starting to get the hang of it. Memories of a man who would find all of this too horrific to bear slid away, like mud in the rain off a window, leaving him frosted over, and numb inside.

He slipped easily into training, it consumed his thoughts more than anything else, and beyond training in the Soldier’s mind were nothing but blank, white drifts of empty space.

He had come to them, from his old life as an expert marksman, but it was hand-to-hand combat that made him especially dangerous to his keepers when The Soldier’s blank violence didn’t /stop/. Bones cracking, necks snapping, he didn’t always see the difference between a target, and a guard, the way a tiger might eat a zookeeper just as soon as a side of lamb. Meat was meat. 

  
The only way to bring the soldier down after that was to club him until he passed out.

Three guards were added, but it still proved to be a fatal shortage. Another was added, and then another. Soon, eight armed guards escorted the Fist of HYDRA around, through the compound, and just when they thought they had enough men, The Soldier turned on them in a fit of agitation. Another group of men lost their lives, but the soldier could not be disciplined, as his fear of killing men now seemed to dissipate. HYDRA wanted him vicious.  Death had become instinct, and guards were replaceable. The Soldier was not.

He crushed the last guard’s throat with one hand, picked him up off the others with his metal hand, and then tossed him aside like a ragdoll. Gas filled the room with a hiss, and The Soldier went down, tranquilized, harmless, and spattered in blood.

When he woke again, there were  _ nine  _ guards.

“Lucky number nine,” a man said in Russian, looking down at the soldier, hands behind his back. ”Like the heads of a HYDRA.”

No guards died that day, or again, for a long time, as  _ nine _ was just enough to hold the soldier down.


	8. Benign

“Sputnik.”

Missions came, and missions went, the amount of time he was kept out in the world depended on training, information gathered, and the mission itself. The Soldier was always carefully wiped clean after each mission, maintained as meticulously as one might maintain a prized rifle. HYDRA risked no memory gritty residue of the mission left behind, none that they knew he could harbor, anyway. 

But even that was hardly a perfect science. The Soldier’s willpower bordered on mythical at times, even after he was given the command to shut down. The word “Sputnik” turned the breathing weapon off, so that he could be handled and stored for future use without any risk. After that word was uttered and the soldier went limp, the mood of his handlers changed. They became much braver when he was ‘unplugged’, and assumed he saw none of it.

The first time The Soldier ever opened his eyes without permission, he was dazed and confused. Three men dragged his body up to the cryo chamber, shoved him inside, and strapped him down as they chatted between themselves about their day, their plans, their weekends as they fastened The Soldier into the tight straps, like they were hanging up a tool at the end of the day.  
The glass door was shut. Murmured Russian outside of the chamber was hard to hear, he knew the words now, he could almost speak it, but never did, not unless they made him. The Soldier was hardly something to converse with, after all. 

Laughter echoed,  _ human _ and distant through the thick glass, and one of them, one of the humans looked right at The Soldier. He could just make out the word ‘benign’ on the man’s smirking lips, as he shook his head at the soldier through the safety of the thick glass, then tapped on it, like The Soldier was a fish in an aquarium: a harmless, contained, prize catch kept far from home.   
  
It was the very last thing that registered before blackness swallowed him up, again.


	9. Homecoming

_ “Would’ya look at that?” Bucky said, looking out over the sea of people dancing in the auditorium just below them, he and Steve standing over the skylight in the ceiling, watching everyone have a good time. _

_ "Why did we have to sneak in this way again?” Steve asked, giving his best friend a slim raised brow. _

_ “‘Cause, pal, it’s more fun this way. No one ever got remembered sneakin’ into a dance through the back door.” _

_ Steve sighed, Bucky had a point, but they had already gotten in trouble once today, which was why they were kicked out from attending the dance at all. _

_ “Trust me, Steve.” _

Back from his first mission, The Soldier was escorted in, flanked by his nine armed guards, bound in cuffs, weapons removed. Boots clanked down the hall, behind him, beside him as they rounded the corner into the prep room. They stopped upon reaching it, the front guard saluting.

  
“Bring him in,” someone commanded in Russian, and the soldier was sat down in the chair, uncuffed and re-cuffed into it. 

“Good, soldier, good. This will be your  _ homecoming _ from now on. Do you like it?”

Electrodes were attached to his head, just as they had done many times before, during ‘therapy’ sessions. He looked up, and saw a glass dome, arched like a skylight. 

Homecoming.  _ Homecoming.  _  The soldier started to panic, he knew the pain, but something about the skylight over him woke something in him for a brief moment. That  _ something _ knew this wasn’t normal, this  _ wasn’t okay _ . This wasn’t what homecoming meant. It couldn’t be a permanent fixture in whatever life he lead here. It couldn’t-   
  
He began to thrash, and some of the metal on the cuffs around his wrists began to bend with the way The Soldier fought them. Every gun in the room was pointed at him, trained on the thrashing monster they’d made as he shouted wordlessly in a rage.

“Sputnik!” the lead technician said, breathless with urgency.

The soldier’s mind went blank, and he sagged back in the chair.

“Wipe him.”


	10. One

When he was first brought in, Barnes had an incredible aptitude for pain ... he just hadn’t realized it yet. HYDRA set about educating him, immediately. They beat him, they broke bones, they shocked him, and they held him under ice water for  _ minutes _ at a time.    
  
At first, Bucky thought they wanted information, they had to want  _ something _ from it. All the information they wanted, however, were numbers. “How is the pain? On a scale of one to ten?” someone with a clipboard would ask in a nearly bored voice, in heavily accented English, pencil raised to record Bucky’s response.   
  
“Fuck … I don’t know! Eight! Eight out of ten! What do you WANT?” Bucky would holler at first, defiant and shaking from head to toe. He would be met with a disdainful look, and another round of excruciating pain with their torture of choice.  More pain was given the  _ next _ day, sometimes combined with another torture, until screams rang out high, which usually didn’t take long.   
  
Months later, Bucky began to float over his body the second they brought him into the conditioning room, and  _ watched _ his jaw clench and his muscles twitch in response to what he knew was coming: the shocks, the burns to the soles of his feet, the ice water. It was like watching a soldier he knew once, a long time ago. He was beginning to forget that soldier’s name.   
  
“How is the pain? On a scale of one to ten?” the technician would ask in Russian.   
  
“F … Five. Four … f- four ...“ he would stutter, in a nearly hopeless voice. Nothing he said made them stop. It was best just to escape to the ceiling, to get through it, get it over with.

It took three months of this sadistic conditioning, between training and everything else, to bring The Soldier to the point that he no longer  _ recognized _ his own pain. He could grunt, he could growl, he could make noise all his body wanted to, but the pain itself had all but disappeared. He was numb to it, unwilling to respond. Pain was an expected part of life, an expected part of missions. He began to accept it, as he accepted breathing. Today, his conditioning came in the form of a beating.

His guards stood around him with heavy clubs, and the Soldier was bound tightly to prevent his resistance to the therapy. Sweat poured down The Soldier’s calm face and flexed neck, but he was quiet, his blue eyes unfocused as he stared straight ahead at nothing where he lay on the floor, not even  _ aware _ that his jaw was broken.

The Soldier was asked, yet again, in Russian by the man with the clipboard, “How is the pain? On a scale of one to ten?”

The soldier rose to his feet with mechanical grace, his expression eerily indifferent and blank as blood ran down his chin, over his throat.

“ _ One _ .”   
  
The man nodded, finally satisfied, and signed the bottom of the form on the clipboard.

 


	11. Freight Car

_ “Where are we going?”  _

_ “The Future.” _

 

“ Remember when I made you ride the 'Cyclone' at Coney Island?” Bucky asked, as the snow came down harder.  He watched the tracks, hearing a train in the distance, coming in quick.

“Yeah, and I threw up?” Steve said, eyes squinting a little where Bucky was looking, too.

“This isn’t payback for that is it?” There was a low tease to Bucky’s voice.

“Now why would I do that?” Steve teased back.

Steve turned to talk to another officer, and Bucky just half listened, waiting for their moment, and when it came, he glided down after his best friend-- Captain America. They landed smoothly on the moving freight train, on the lookout for HYDRA agents and Zola himself, the man Bucky had been rescued from not just days before.

These would be his last moments of the rest of his life before everything changed, before the freight train carried them to their separate futures.


	12. Epilogue

“Good morning, Soldier,” the HYDRA officer says, in Russian.

The soldier stares at the man, mind now wiped of anything, but the next orders to be given.

“Ready to comply.”


End file.
